Murder Numbers in Guatemala

The 2011 figure includes actual murders up to Nov. and an estimate for Dec.

If you haven't read Nic Wertz's piece on Otto Perez Molina and the Guatemala Justice System, I would encourage you to do so. The justice system in Guatemala that has made progress in recent months is coming under attack from a variety of angles.

Anyway, we were going back and forth in the comments section and he said that Otto Perez had said during the campaign trail that Guatemala was suffering an average of approximately 25 murders a day. That would work out to be 9,125 murders per year, nearly 3,000 more than 2009 which is the worst year outside of the civil war.

Now, there seem to be a few explanations for the different between Perez's numbers and those of the PNC who have the country's murder totals approaching 5,600 for the year.

The PNC is wrong. They might be missing ten murders each day because they labelled them disappearances rather than murders. There might be mass graves like those found in Mexico in recent years. Either of those scenarios would explain the difference. I imagine that the PNC's numbers would then have been wrong each of the last few years which would effect total murders and rates, but probably not the overall trajectory of a decline in murders in 2010 and 2011. Unless it was just this year that they were off.

A second explanation is that the General is just playing loose with the numbers for political reasons. A former general who based his campaign on criticizing the outgoing administration for allowing the security situation to escalate out of control would not let facts stand in his way, would he?

He might have purposely cited the 25 figure to drum up fear among Guatemalans (as if they didn't have enough already). An accepted number of 25 murders per day and 9,000 or so a year would also make it much easier for him to attain his campaign promise of reducing the murder rate by 20%.

Now, if CICIG is using 17 murders each day that would correspond, roughly speaking, to the numbers form 2008. There were about 18 murders per day in 2009 and 16 in 2010. Now let's see what happens in December. If things stay the same this month as they have all year, Guatemala will check in with about 15.5 murders per month day. Not great, but getting better again.